Omnihold does not bring anyone with actual responsibility to a summit, because negotiators should be optimized for communication and not decision-making. Their delegates are supermodels of various gendertropes in open ribbon ensembles. They have perfect smiles - with artificial teeth mounted over modular sockets, serving both as an input device and a bone-conduction replacement for earpieces. They have gorgeous hair - indistinguishable from the real thing, but with EEG monitoring grids tucked under the wigs.

Their proportions and facial symmetry are borderline infohazardous, the kind of look you only get by auctioning gametes with a top-1% population filter, and their pristine skin looks like it hasn't known a blemish since birth.

They stick close to each other with the friendly vibe, taking turns to speak and interrupting one another with a scripted organicity. Two-thirds of them are female, three-thirds are pumped full of empathogens, all are under twenty-five. A few wear suspiciously thin AR glasses with cameras, which, if anyone’s internal prediction markets are betting on it, are just thin clients with minimal onboard processing, relaying signals back to a much beefier router.

Omnihold gives their opening speech, noting that the portal seems narrow enough that any post-industrial civ could block or destroy it from their side, and that this is a good starting point to choose Something Which Is Not This. They commit to not using the portal for any scenario that the gatekeeper civilizations could have retrospectively stopped by denying them passage, even if gatekeeper's mutual enclaves in each other's territories become practically capable of undesirable behavior with impunity, and hope for the same in return. They believe that this contact can’t be worse than its absence and is likely much, much better!

Given the logistical constraints, scientific data, cultural assets, and biological samples seem like the obvious trade items. Consequently, they’re curious about how other worlds handle intellectual property and what exactly their enforcement looks like.

The delegation from Ailor consists of the Head of State, Head of Government, Representative of Representatives, and a small swarm of identically black clad attendants trying to disappear into the background. 

The Head of Government is an older man whose outfit looks like it was cobbled together from a half dozen types of regalia or more. His hat is a tiara wrapped around a headdress wrapped around a crown. A half cape crowns his kimono and is held in place by a large torc. His boots are heavily beaded moccasins that rattle when he walks. He leans often on a slim but ornate staff taller than he is.  

The Head of Government is wearing practical low profile power armor.

The Representative of Representatives is wearing an ornate toga made of some sheer material that continually threatens to be scandalous but never quite manages to achieve that, paired with dressy but practical sandals. 

All of the Ailori wear a deck on their non-dominant arm and their clothes are covered densely with the colored dots of their writing. Anyone could read it if they don't mind staring closer than might be polite on some worlds. 

Ailor does not have a concept of intellectual property and is not sure the concept is translating properly.

The Head of State finishes the opening formalities and sits down.

The Representative of Representatives engages the Omnihold delegation. Would they consider a blanket information and data sharing agreement for this intellectual property? A symmetrically stochastically unfair exchange has the most expected value and least overhead. If not, then is is acceptable to manage our trade-ledger with Omnihold as a unit and allow you to manage things internally from there? 

The delegate leaning forward, maintaining maximum eye contact with the Representative of Representatives, seems surprised, but in a good way - more like an itch to see Trade With Aliens finally manifest in reality. Information regulation is tricky, and societies without it are a common trope, but usually, they appear in "fragile mutual deterrence between uncoordinated warlords" settings. To not even have the concept of IP, however, carries a subverted tint of sanctity. If no one in their world has ever suffered a pathetic bout of paranoia about someone stealing and monetizing their super-valuable precious ideas, then she’s definitely sponsoring sperm and egg imports in hopes of replicating their population.

Her teeth vibrate imperceptibly, and the voice in her head, which she merely vocalizes, begins a brief recap of an ancient parable on the value of information, trying to shyly insert LLM-advised ailorianisms and overall be aesthetically pleasing to listener. She uses a metaphor where knowledge is a series of islands that no one created, but merely discovered while wandering the realm of ideas. Much like the bounties of nature, that which is not man-made belongs to no one - or belongs equally to all cooperative agents, justifying a UBI from geo-rent. But when you pluck a fruit from a wild tree, you must pay for depriving others of it. Information-fruits, however, are instantly copied, you deprive no one of them. It sounds compelling that all should be free to use them.

But if an island is uninhabited and far from civilization, it’s no comfort that you have the right to eat its fruit without limit, first, you have to get there. Therefore, the discoverer has every right to build a bridge and sell the fruit, to get paid for their logistical services - and to prevent the cultivation of those fruits by removing the seeds, for without them, those fruits wouldn't be on the market at all.

Yet, they don’t own the idea itself. Anyone else can build a similar bridge if they can prove they did it independently - that they found the island in their own travels without knowledge of the existing bridge. In modern terms: you can get a duplicate of any patent through "clean room design" in a causally isolated environment with a delayed news feed and so on, after which you may sell similar rights to view art, produce tech, or any other fruits of your island.

(the male delegate enters the dialogue, contrasting with the previous fairy-tale tone):

Except it’s just stupid to build two identical bridges to the same island. It’s not like they have bandwidth limits. So, the discoverer sets a price based on the expected time until the rediscovery of their island, extracting profit for accelerating progress relative to a counterfactual universe where someone else found it later. Prediction markets, given proper data for calibration, become uncannily accurate at this.

Some patents still cause disputes regarding the fair price and the probability function of rediscovery, but gremirians maintain a clean-room infrastructure and a legal consensus on proper causal isolation so that any unfair knowledge monopolies naturally inflate to zero. It’s a sad zero-sum game, but a necessary response to defection.

Furthermore, their current consensus holds that rights to creative works have an unlimited duration, as it is virtually impossible to create literally the same piece of art independently - every bridge leads to its own unique island. Inspiration from others' work, however, remains free. You don't pay royalties to the original author when writing fanfics.

All of this is relevant to how the Omnihold plans to evaluate Ailori data. They will trade the rights to use intellectual property as a special form of equity, identifying an ideal competitive price - indefinite for culture, and based on counterfactual discovery time for technology. However, they intend to isolate the profit accounts for each individual work until the author is identified.

They are glad the median Ailori are generous enough to share ideas freely. But if a small group of Ailori is dissatisfied with the status quo and wishes to be paid directly - and simply lacks the infrastructure for monetization - they may contact Omnihold to claim authorship and receive direct payouts after identity verification. In cases of refused profit, inability to determine preferences of the author (e.g., death), unidentifiable authorship, or excessive identification costs, they are prepared to route these accounts directly to the Ailor government.

In the other direction, regarding the sale of data from the Omnihold to Ailor, the proposed deal with the state as a single entity does indeed sound like the best option. Nonpublic prediction markets on both sides can bet on the expected value of the knowledge before its public release and the timelines for independent rediscovery to determine price, with standard probability-of-refusal functions proportional to the expected unfairness of the deal. Does this sound fair and implementable?

The Representative of Representatives makes eye contact and smiles back, her manner going slightly sultry. There's no super-stimulus about her, but just genuine and honest curiosity. She speaks little and listens much as the metaphor unfolds. And she actively listens, paying her full attention and seeming to follow along easily even as the Ailorianisms start to sound like Oma Desala speaking Tamarian. She's almost ready to reply when the second delegate enters the conversation. 

These prediction markets sound interesting! Ailor does ever reproduce the bridges to the islands of knowledge to better credit research, as a training tool, and as a competitive sport. The Representative isn't old enough to have any experience with actual currency, but it sounds like this prediction market ought to reproduce their experimental results in a new way. How long do you think it will take to teach someone how to prediction market, and what sort of isolation setup would you recommend for them? 

The Kastakian delegation is about as organised as ever, which means there appear to be three separate crews involved and none of them have successfully come to a consensus on their position before running out of time and just showing up anyway. Also they are humanoid sized feathered lizards along the lines of Archaeopteryx, and while they are thoroughly adorned in utility belts and backpacks they don't appear to have much use for clothing.

While the more Serious Business crew have been listening, making a lot of notes, and occasionally having confused whispered arguments over why their counterparts still seem to think they exist in conditions of scarcity even though that is clearly not the case, and the more Sensible crew has been setting up a refreshments station with long descriptions of the ingredients and processes in case any of the other delegates want some fish snacks or fruit water, the science oriented crew has most finished hooking up a rather bulky and complicated looking device that now displays a simple text menu in green on black, with a rather clunky large keyboard attached for inputs. It is attached to some large cables snaking back out through the portal, which appear to be necessary for the local Internet equivalent. 

"Connection to the Network is available!" crows Yompam triumphantly. "If you'd like to contribute or read our entire civilisational output, it's all here. As a reminder, we are philosophically opposed to anyone having to reinvent the wheel for any reason. If you have a connector from previous contacts, the splice point is here, for quicker retrieval. Obviously we also appreciate contributions, and give our thanks for previous knowledge transfer that has been very useful, although we are using tried and tested technology here rather than the output of relevant endeavour groups to avoid any safety issues."

Junilla takes a break from the snack area to contribute, "I don't think we're compatible for offspring, but if you have advances that could use our genetic material, I'm sure you'll recieve more volunteers than you can use."

"I would just like to clarify that because of the population disparity it is absolutely possible you could use all available samples, if you did find a route to doing so."

(As a reminder of information which would have been shared in previous summits: Kastakia struggles to stay at replacement rate with only around a million inhabitants; Kastakians lay single large eggs and generally devote a whole found-family group to raising one egg) 

Property is pretty simple in theory. If you made a thing or use a thing then it's yours. Combined with the fungibility of labor that allows you to generate a Blue Book value by collecting large amounts of data for a task and calculating the expectation value. Ideally we would have Blue Book values for everything, but as noted some things are difficult or time consuming to replicate. As-a-result there are portions of society that de facto run on vibes and polycule dynamics. We've only been in the Current Era for about 30 years, so information on Gremiria's mistakes would in expectation be quite useful.

That's a novel and interesting way to ask for sex. However, if you want sex you can just ask directly. Here is the indicator on her clothing that she's open to being approached for sex and here is her sexual preferences and limits.

It seems like there's a limited time opportunity to exploit inter-world ignorance for otherwise difficult repetition testing. Usually we just secure an appropriate venue and spin up a sub net. Unfortunately, this mostly means that we can only use students and only once. As long as most people aren't cheating the game then any leaks would show up as a radical outlier and naturally be trimmed. 

The Head of Government types something out on his deck, and a tech approaches Yompam to see about interfacing nets properly. Ailor has a curated sub net compressed for easy transfer that Kastakian can just have, and enough empty storage to handle multiple uncompressed Internets in expectation. 

The Head of State ceremoniously breaks a loaf of bread into pieces while chanting out an incantation in Latin. The Ailori contribution to the snack bar is laboratory grade potable water and a few forms of a very basic bread. Each is very clearly labeled with its component ingredients, going so far as to include molecular diagrams and pie charts. They don't want to accidentally poison someone with different biology. 

The delegation from the Second Republic consists mostly of translator-secretaries for Vuleftis, an Academy-educated member of parliament and on the committee vis-a-vis suzerainty. He was selected for this mission because his background gives him insight into what three of the largest factions on his world might find acceptable in any sort of negotiation. Up to this point, he and his translators have been quietly trying to follow several conversations in different languages none of them have previously heard spoken correctly, containing concepts they don't have full reference points for.

A foreign Head of State saying something almost intelligible was not in the briefing and is frankly more shocking than talking bird-people.

"Oh, uh, that was more along the lines of the delegate from Gremiria's remarks regarding the desire for children with a different motivational system - we do have currency, but ideas aren't something we would consider trading for it, it's really just to make sure we get enough medical and care staff and essential resource extraction, by offering them better resource access when they're incapacitated. Ideas are for being used.

As for property, some people do like to keep specific personal comfort objects, and sometimes essential equipment needs to not be open for anyone to wander off with?"

Vuleftis looks over the translation diagrams. The delegates from Ailor, Gremiria, and Kastakia all say they have money, but it isn't clear they're using the term the same way.

"Excuse me,"  Vuleftis says, pausing for the translators to repeat him. "Maybe I missed something in my notes, but as near as I can tell, these terms of 'money' and 'currency' translate to something like this." He holds up what looks like a tiny, flat, gold cylinder, and passes it to a secretary to pass around the table. "And it functions as a voucher for some allotment of economic output?"

One of the Serious faction finally speaks up. "Metals are one of the things that might be exchangeable for currency units if a hospital-ship is running out of them, or occasionally if an endeavour-group wants them that badly and can't demonstrate how useful they'll be to them any other way, but mostly the hospital-ships just keep records of accrued currency."

"And the hospital-ships will provide for anyone, but if you haven't accrued any currency you'll be in a shared ward and on cheap mass catering food, which many people are motivated to avoid."

Vuleftis nods slowly. He's guessing "currency units" are a more abstract form of what coins represent and that instances of that abstraction are not exactly lying around in the Republic's vault, ready to be traded. 

Vuleftis looks at another diagram. Then he pulls out a dictionary and flips through it. Then he looks at the diagram again. "Theocratic communism" sounds like what the High Council has been trying to engineer for over a hundred years. Sure, no Council member would claim they'd succeeded. And certain aspects of the cultural malaise seem attributable to the Council's plans. But only the most uncharitable cynic would say that it's "failed hideously."

Of course, everyone else here seems more technologically advanced. Maybe that's the problem? You don't expect civilization to make it through the decade if every individual builds their own death ray. Maybe communism creates the conditions to let people create the anti-communism... thing? In any case, the Council will surely want any data about communist failure modes that the Ailori get from the gremirians.

It was not an offer of sex! Our sexuality is decoupled from reproduction, though we will keep the suggestion in mind for the future. We intended to propose a trade in gametes, which seems a far more straightforward method of replicating a foreign population on one’s own planet.

Omnihold possesses a concept of "sharing food as a universal gesture of trust", but this was not a high priority in the delegate selection process, gremirians are quite picky eaters. But fine, after some consultation with the voices in their heads and processing preferences via teeth interfaces and EEG, they have identified a delegate who would be genuinely delighted to sample the alien fish snacks while chatting with the Kastakians.

...Kastakia, regardless of how much you insist on waiving gratitude at a collective level, we will still sell your knowledge at what we deem fair prices and register accounts to the authors until they are claimed under our system. At least for now. Millions of our people are already sorting through the downloaded data so that our "debt" for ideas authored by the deceased can be directed to you as a society - allowing for a symmetrical gratitude in the form of immediate publication of our own data for a roughly equivalent sum. However, we still fear offending individuals who might disagree with your system, those more egoistic who cannot receive direct compensation otherwise.

Money is a much broader term than a unit of exchange! Before radio, it might have been metals, sure, but people dreamed of a Total Market ETF as a currency long before the technical means existed. Under the Efficient Market Hypothesis, investing in every business on the planet equally is the investor's null hypothesis. There is an aesthetic beauty to it - every transaction becomes an addition to the supermind of humanity, signaling that someone believes they see a way to extract value above the market average through cooperation with others.

But that is not the most vital part. When you have a single fund owning ~one-third of every corporation, it becomes "egoistically altruistic" and internalizes externalities, because damage caused by one company hurts others within the same portfolio, as in universal ownership theory. It also votes for the adoption of universal industry standards via assurance contracts, aligning companies toward a common good - such as interlocking modular buildings - and can occasionally sponsor projects requiring global cooperation, like paying for universal language courses to transition to a conlang. This, by the way, is what Omnihold is.

The problem with attempting to build communism is that despite a majority recognizing that Open Individualism and the Veil of Ignorance under Eternalism make Total Hedonistic Utilitarianism the correct course of action, our nature is illusory. We are tethered to time and ego in an evolutionary cage. In practice, one cannot be an absolutely coherent Bodhisattva, loving others as oneself. They work on meditations, psychedelics, therapy and general education to increase coherence and the chances of interpersonal experiences, but usually, this is not required, as you can be useful to others simply by being egoistically efficient. This is to say nothing of the 3/20 who disagree with this metaphysics entirely.

Gremirians simply lack the internal motivation to help others. They may realize they are acting counterproductively to their own interests in a retrospective maximization of the chance of being a happy moment, but they feel no guilt or other form of negative feedback in connection with this. Their charity averages 1/15 of the GDP, but three-quarters of that comes from inheritances - and even inheritances are problematic, as most strive to exhaust their entire savings exactly before assisted suicide in old age.

The laws of physics make destruction easier than creation, so ancient attempts to coerce more coherent altruistic behavior led to corruption on a scale above a maximum of ~9*60^2, or guaranteed mutual destruction via cheap toxin production both within and between cities, or duty-evasion and parasitism by large swaths of the population, forcing the adoption of a framework of freedom as a point of compromise. Sure, here there are some detailed historical records.

"If you can prepare a document on how you intend to raise the children, and ideally a template of options for people to choose from, some Adventurers are very likely to make ready to donate eggs. If you'd like other gametes for study rather than direct use we're likely to get more sample than we can easily transfer through the world interface."

"Reciprocation is highly appreciated. I am not sure we can reasonably reciprocate the reception of your own gametes for replicating a foreign population locally - one of our concerns since this all started is being outcompeted for our own natural resources, as you might understand."

We do in fact have in vitro if you want gametes, although we don't expect that to be sufficient or necessary to reproduce the population whatever that means? Trading for diversity is likely a good idea.

Ailor is shocked by the idea that Gremirians can't achieve Universal Love! A typical Ailori can manage at least the very basics of Universal Love, Zen, and Enlightenment with minimal exposure to the concepts and a few months hermitage at the appropriate developmental stage, even in environments actively hostile to its development. If that doesn't work.... we don't actually know what to do to help. It's as bizarre to Ailor as if you had said you spend an hour a month breathing water. 

(This is Ailor's first summit, so they may be lacking context Kastakia provided with previous summits if it's not in the internet-sharing)

The Head of State is the only one to touch the coin even as it's held up for the Head of Government to examine. The Head of Government looks at it like it's mildly radioactive before schooling his demeanor and replying, "Yes, we had something like this in our past. We no longer use currency as a means of rationing. It's still used at times in board games and such, as a way of simulating scarcity."

"What, uh, do you have intrinsic motivation for if not helping others, then? Just the standard food, sex, comfort, or is there something else we might be missing here?" 

"I don't want to present us as flawless, we do have those who just opt out of society. You won't find their direct works in our Internet because they definitely opt out of that."